The ease with which digital music, books and other written content, digital photographs and graphics, digitized video and other media and content may be shared, stored and retransmitted has highlighted the challenge of copyright and other ready rights management in the Internet era. While authors, composers, artists and others can take advantage of certain digital rights management (DRM) or digital asset management (DAM) technologies and platforms today, those approaches have drawbacks and limitations.
For example, photographers, publishers and others may retain or attempt to retain the rights in digital photographs posted on the Internet through embedded digital rights metadata inserted into image files such as TIFF, JPEG or other formats. In such cases, the original artist or other rights holder may embed an image header with date, file size and possibly encryption or password-protection data, to prevent the unauthorized use or reproduction of the graphical or other work. Thus, members of the viewing public may not be able to use a browser to save a copyrighted news photograph to their hard drives without a passcode or encryption key, for example.
However, even platforms which are aware of provisioning rights and include mechanisms to enforce copy protection may be insufficiently sophisticated to manage digital works which are more than simple texts or unitary images. For example, a news or other media Web site may present up-to-date stories in a more flexible format including text, associated photographs inserted in the story at a designed point, clickable audio clips, or streamed or other video or other media components. There is no way to effectively protect and manage the various modular parts of such a media object in an independent fashion.
That is, even if current rights management schemes may or could be extended to multimedia news or other Web presentations, the viewer of that content mat or would be limited to an encryption key or other mechanism which would merely lock or unlock the overall combination of media components in monolithic fashion, as illustrated in FIG. 1. Separate components of that content, such as individual photographs, sections or chapters of texts, video clips or other components, could not be accessed, checked out, copied or otherwise processed individually.
Because the constituent parts of the content can not be individually manipulated, the management and exploitation of rights in the overall media package may be constrained. For instance, a Web publisher or other may desire to make newspaper text redistributable but withhold the redistribution of associated video files, but this is impossible under current digital asset management platforms which place the entire object into an encrypted container. Other problems exist.